Owen Marshall Selected Stories

by Vincent O'Sullivan

  ‘He’s into my grog, isn’t he?’

  ‘Stop being a tight-arse and give him the money. He shouldn’t pay for us.’

  ‘Yeah, okay,’ said Gazz. He had a particular reason for wanting Vicky friendly while Turtle was away. He walked down to Turtle’s hall door. Turtle had assumed that he was alone and so hadn’t fully closed the bedroom door. From the hall doorway, looking across the living room, Gazz could see all of the bedhead and chest of drawers and Turtle wasn’t in sight. The soft noise of Turtle retrieving money came from the other end of the room. Gazz stepped back into the hall and didn’t show himself until Turtle was on the way out. He walked with Turtle to the front door, stood on the darkening veranda while Turtle unlocked the chain from his wheel. ‘No need to rip your guts getting back,’ said Gazz. ‘Know what I mean?’ Turtle wheeled his bike away on the concrete path. Gazz couldn’t make out his expression in the dark.

  Vicky wasn’t all that ready to fall in with Gazz’s plans, even though she kept the gin bottle busy, and allowed Gazz to have his hand between her broad thighs in a companionable sort of way. Gazz tried to push her back on the sofa. ‘Get off,’ she said languidly.

  ‘Aw, come on, Vick.’

  ‘We can have it in bed later on, for Christ’s sake.’

  ‘Aw, come on.’

  ‘Turtle will be back in a minute.’

  ‘So what,’ said Gazz. He wished that he’d never invited Turtle anyway. He was just an old sod. No use at all.

  ‘Yeah, you’d get a buzz out of that, wouldn’t you? Turtle coming back and seeing us. Well, forget it. Did you give him some money?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Gazz. He made the most of feeling her up, and drew her head on to his shoulder with the other hand, but he felt irritation not tenderness. And Vicky had used some sort of hairspray that was unpleasant on his cheek and left a smell that reminded him of the floral air freshener in the staff cafeteria at Gabites Plywood.

  ‘We’ll be able to pay some of the back rent, won’t we?’ said Vicky.

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Gazz.

  Turtle was something of a gentleman, and made a noise coming in the door and down the hall. He looked sillier than usual, with his corduroys tucked into very short, white socks. ‘My hero,’ said Vicky and she went into the kitchen to fetch plates and tomato sauce.

  ‘Good one,’ said Gazz. He noticed that Turtle put his keys on the mantelpiece of the walled-up fireplace before sorting the food. Gazz handed the second gin bottle to Turtle. ‘Get some of this down you while it lasts,’ he said.

  It was Vicky’s habit to become girlish when drunk, giggling and pretending to be shocked by behaviour that she’d exceeded for years. Not that there was anything to shock her about Gazz and Turtle. Gazz drank slowly, saying less and less; Turtle was the reverse on both counts. Vicky and Turtle had a butting contest on the sofa. After the first bout or two, Turtle caught Gazz’s eye before starting again, but Gazz gave no sign that he cared. ‘Playing silly buggers,’ he said. The scar above his eye seemed accentuated by the drinking, and he tipped his head right back to blow smoke at the single light bulb. Turtle began to sing ‘Lili Marlene’. He said his father had been an artillery colonel in the war. Vicky joined in, her voice high, penetrating and unmusical.

  Vicky was the first to fall asleep, and Turtle pretended to be, because he wanted to stay there on the sofa with his face pushed close to her chest. Gazz went quietly into their bedroom and packed the best of his stuff into the large duffle bag he used instead of a case. When he came out again he could tell that Turtle was really asleep, because his head had rolled out from Vicky’s breast a little and his breathing was wheezy. His worn, but oddly boyish face had a sweat of drunkenness on it, and his shirt was nicked up to expose the tunnel of his belly button in the roll of his stomach. Vicky slept with a fatuous but good-humoured smile on the large pear of her face. Gazz could stare at their unprotected faces, which seemed in relaxation to be lumpish, functionally organic — like a head of cauliflower, or a canker on the bole of a cherry tree. ‘Completely out the monk,’ said Gazz softly to himself, and he made a noise in his nose that sounded like a succession of sniffs, but was a reduced laugh.

  Gazz took Turtle’s keys from the mantelpiece and closed the door behind himself, as he went into the hall. The light there was no longer green-yellow, but almost grey from the one small bulb at the Tierneys’ end. Gazz unlocked Turtle’s door and went through to the bedroom. It was drab, but tidy, with just one large Toulouse Lautrec poster as a sign of any other life that Turtle may have had. Gazz knew which end to search, even though it appeared unlikely. There was only a two bar cabinet heater and Gazz soon found the envelope hidden in the back. He counted at least seven hundred dollars. ‘Cunning old bugger,’ said Gazz. His tone was half admiration, half contempt. He added Turtle’s notes to his own, and was so intrigued by the bulk he had in the wallet that he squeezed it several times to feel the wad expand again within the leather. ‘Shit,’ he said.

  On his way to the front door, Gazz didn’t check on Turtle and Vicky. He put his duffle bag on his left shoulder and walked carefully down the subsided concrete path, past the stump of the grocer’s chestnut tree and the japonica blooms that were colourless in the night. He made no pause at the gateway; he marked his departure in no way whatsoever, not even a glance up at the house. He walked steadily away along the dark, quiet street. What reason was there to look back? There were just the two lights showing. The white light from the room where Vicky and Turtle were sleeping, and the pink light through the sheet pinned over the bedroom window.

  A Late Run

  ‘Spruiker?’ called the attendant. No one moved, or replied, and the man looked at the slip of paper again. His lips shaped the name to check pronunciation. ‘Spruiker?’ he said more coarsely.

  Reece Spruiker had been watching through the foyer window as a southerly came up. There’d be a fair blow and cold rain as the front moved through. ‘That’s me,’ he said. It was no longer of any real concern to him what the weather did.

  ‘Well, come on, come on.’ The attendant took Spruiker’s two suitcases that showed cardboard through the wear on their cheap mottled surfaces. He carried them to the mini-van and slid the door open for them and the old man who followed.

  ‘Now, Mr Spruiker,’ said the attendant loudly. ‘I’ll put you on at the depot, right, and your daughter will meet you in Dunedin. Right? Don’t wander off at any stop in between except for a quick piss.’

  ‘I know all that.’

  ‘Then why have you been in the bin?’

  The attendant didn’t find a park close to the depot, and had to carry both cases a fair way. ‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘What you got in here? You murdered somebody or something?’

  ‘Not lately,’ said Spruiker.

  The attendant didn’t feel any need to wait around until the bus left. ‘Remember you stay put until Dunedin,’ he said and leant forward for the next few words. ‘Watch yourself, you old prick,’ he said.

  ‘Soft bugger,’ replied Spruiker. He waited to make sure that his suitcases were loaded, then climbed into the bus and took a seat as far back as possible.

  Some faces are as if carved from soap — sanitised, opaque, all of a part. Others are wonderfully physical, animalistic even, with veins, sprouting hair, blemishes, folds and stains, gleams of linings and liquids and the stench of life. Spruiker’s head would look at home on the body of a goat. He watched a woman board who must have been barely forty. She had excellent tits, but instead of taking pride in them her expression was one of discontent.

  As the bus journeyed south into the evening, Reece Spruiker watched the farmland and assessed the crops and stock without being aware that he did it. An old man is mainly conditioning. Only the thistles were green in the dry, autumn paddocks. Eventually he could see no more than his own reflection in the dark window. He had been accustomed to sit on the step of his hut at Erewhon in the evenings with a beer and his dog, watching the shadows close in on the Ra
ngitata headwaters, but a new owner can’t be expected to inherit goodwill towards an old shepherd who’s well past it. Spruiker saw no reason for self-pity in that, or in the fact that, out of five children, only his eldest daughter could be bothered with him. He hadn’t gone out of his way for them and expected nothing in return. You had to be prepared to take in life what you dished out.

  June and Keith were waiting for him and took him home to the small, weather-board cottage by the old Caversham shops. ‘Is any other stuff coming down?’ asked June.

  ‘I sold the dogs,’ he said.

  ‘Just two cases then,’ said Keith, ‘and June was wondering where we’d put a load of stuff. Jesus! Good on you.’ Keith put the cases in the small, south-facing room. It had a high ceiling and a built-in dark varnished wardrobe with leadlight glass in the door to the hat compartment. Tricky, bubbled paper gave the walls a strange sinuosity.

  ‘A pretty flash place,’ said Spruiker, and meant it. He could even catch sight of trees on the hill above the motorway.

  ‘You can’t be knocking about by yourself at your age, Dad. You can’t do for yourself for ever.’ June didn’t mention the memory problems he had, the hospital assessment. Spruiker had forgotten all about it.

  He wasn’t any great trouble, both June and Keith were quick to say that. She did grit her teeth when she heard him spitting phlegm into the basin, and she had to raid his room to get clothes for the wash. He was good at preparing vegetables, doing shopping for her, taking in the washing by four during the winter when she was still at work. Mostly he walked, often down to the various grounds to watch sports teams practising — any sport. Also he liked television; mainly sport again, but also films that often had women’s legs and breasts bared for him.

  Apart from money for a beer in the evening, he gave his modest universal super to June. In his own odd, selfish way he was a proud man and, faced with the realisation that he might live a good while longer and not be able to maintain his independence, he wondered if he might end up being a nuisance to the only one of his children who didn’t treat him with the same cheerful disregard with which he had treated them. Maybe his physical toughness would rebound on him in the end, if the mental side went first. There were special homes, he knew, which charged hundreds a week.

  ‘Dad’s always gone his own way. You know that,’ Alec had said. ‘Tough as old rope.’

  ‘He never interfered; that was the good thing,’ Margie had said.

  ‘The bad thing was that he never cared.’

  ‘He wouldn’t thank you for doing anything for him. Not a bit of it,’ Nigel had said. ‘Old people set in their ways are best left alone. I read this article on it somewhere.’

  ‘I’ve got commitments closer to home, that’s for sure,’ Louise had said.

  But June reckoned that, with nowhere to go and being seventy, her dad needed some help, at least until the latest memory problem sorted itself out. Keith was very fond of his own parents. He could see that June needed to make something of an effort.

  ‘I’m fine. I’m fine,’ said Spruiker. ‘Jesus, I’ve looked after myself all my life just about.’

  Of the five children, June had the fewest resources to assist her father. Nigel was actually rich, but was cautious about admitting it. June worked in a bakery, and Keith did part-time in the Civic Information Centre, after suffering a breakdown while teaching.

  Quite often Keith had time to sit with his father-in-law during the day and watch television, or endeavour to keep up with him as he walked about the city. Keith held no grudge that Spruiker hadn’t bothered to give June and him a wedding present years before, though his own parents were very different. He rather enjoyed the old guy’s earthy directness, his contempt for his fellows, his emotional reticence.

  In the spring a veterans’ athletic series from America was shown on afternoon television. Wrinkled people with necks full of tendons, taking themselves seriously in a whole range of events. Some of them were has-beens who couldn’t give up gracefully; some were never-beens who found that they could foot it at the end of their lives. Spruiker laughed until his eyes watered at such people making goats of themselves; rejoicing in twilight victories and medal ceremonies; confiding in the interviewers as to their training programmes; sporting their monogrammed gear and warm-up exercises. ‘What a load of wankers,’ he told Keith. ‘A bunch of bloody nellies.’

  He stopped laughing when Keith pointed out to him the size of the crowds there to watch and the size of the cash purses. ‘It’s a fad thing in America at present,’ said Keith. ‘Something to do with their determination to empower the old and enhance their sociological profile. And money’s no problem over there, you know.’

  ‘How much did that old coot get for winning the hurdles?’ asked Spruiker.

  ‘Fifteen thousand dollars US. Nearer thirty in our money.’

  ‘Eh!’ said Spruiker incredulously.

  ‘Nearly thirty thousand dollars. And that’s a regional meet.’

  ‘Jesus George! What about that spindly, hatchet-faced bint who won the long women’s race?’

  ‘I think it said not all that much less.’

  Spruiker watched the series with less contempt after that. He was amazed that there was a market for all those old people aping the athletics of excellence. He asked Keith to keep a record of the winning fifteen hundred metres times.

  ‘Why, do you think you’ll have a go?’

  ‘Don’t you tell any bugger.’ Spruiker was quite sensitive to ridicule, although he didn’t show it.

  ‘There’s no money in veterans’ athletics here anyway,’ said Keith.

  ‘Never you mind.’

  On a September Sunday morning when the sun was bright, but without heat, old Spruiker asked Keith to go with him down to the Caversham Oval. ‘Don’t say anything to any bugger, not even June. I’m not going to be made a laughing stock. Has your watch got a second hand?’ Spruiker carried a cheap new pair of tennis shoes in a supermarket bag. ‘I haven’t the skills for the specialist events,’ he told Keith, ‘but I reckon I can run as fast as those old bastards there on the television.’

  ‘I think you underestimate them.’

  ‘I was mustering until just a few years ago,’ said Spruiker. ‘I’ve never smoked. I’ve had years and years of high-country air, not like those poor city buggers. And I haven’t talked, shagged, boozed, or molly-coddled myself into weakness.’

  There wasn’t anyone else at the Oval, and that suited Spruiker just fine. He put on the tennis shoes and tucked his trouser cuffs into his grey socks. He took off his green woollen jersey to reveal a grey workshirt with a blue stain at the pocket where a biro had burst. He spat on the ground where the track was marked, and lifted his arms rather awkwardly a few times as a suggestion of limbering up exercises. He was of only average height and he was thin, ugly and seventy years old. He had lines so deep running from both sides of his nose and down past his mouth that his face seemed to have been put together in segments. Years of sun had created a blossom of small cancers on his weathered skin. ‘Say go when you’re ready,’ he told Keith, who tried not to smile. ‘Four times around. That’s what you said?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Okay then,’ said Spruiker.

  ‘Get set, go,’ said Keith. He made a show for the old guy by looking keenly at the watch. Spruiker kept his arms low while he ran and his shoulders turned from side to side in what seemed to Keith a poor action. Spruiker’s knees didn’t come up much either, but he had a surprisingly long stride. He ran round the Caversham Oval four times without any apparent variation in pace, or action, and when he’d finished he’d come within nine seconds of the man from Wabash, Indiana, who had won fifteen thousand dollars at the regional veterans’ meet at Tulsa.

  ‘Jesus,’ said Keith. ‘Jesus, Reece, you did just fine. But maybe I made some cock-up with the watch.’

  ‘No,’ said Spruiker. ‘As soon as I saw those old pricks on the telly I knew I’d do almost as well.
All my life I’ve had good wind. For years and years I was the top beat musterer on every station I worked on. I reckon there’s an opportunity to take some easy money from those soft American buggers who’ve got so much of it they’ll spend it watching geriatrics rupturing themselves.’

  ‘It’s not a bad idea, I suppose.’

  ‘It’s got to be done in the next year or two, though,’ said Spruiker. He put his jersey on again, replaced the tennis shoes in the plastic bag. Keith waited in the cool sun. A tall woman with imperiously piled, grey hair was walking a King Charles spaniel that was sorely in need of exercise. A young guy, cutting across the Oval, had stopped to comb his hair, using the club house window as a mirror. Keith knew that Spruiker was most comfortable when coming out with things in his own way and his own time.

  ‘The first reason,’ said Spruiker, ‘is that I’m seventy. I’ll be among the youngest in the seventy to seventy-five age group. That’s a real plus, I reckon. You can go down hill bloody quick at my age. The other thing is that the old grey matter is getting a bit dicey. I could be making chicken noises to myself in the corner any time now.’

  Keith and Spruiker talked a good deal about the first point on their way home. The other thing was never mentioned between them again.

  ‘Maybe,’ said Keith to June that night, for, as a good husband he told his wife everything in secret, ‘maybe your dad’s really on to something.’

  ‘One way and another he’s been running all his life,’ she said.

  Keith, who considered that his teaching experience fitted him for both tasks, became coach and manager. As coach he insisted that Spruiker buy some first-rate running shoes; as manager he corresponded with the United States Pan Veterans’ Athletics Association and boned up on all the rules and requirements. He began to read a good many books about motivation and metabolism and budget travel, which increased his confidence, but had no other benefit.